"Banksters". I thought that was a term invented to label and revile those who persuaded the British and American authorities to bail them out in 2008 while letting them keep their bonuses. It turns out that, according to the new science of culturenomics, the word "banksters" has been around for a long time and was approximately ten times as frequently cited in the 1930's in Google's data base of books as it was in each of the years of the new millennium, including 2008.

Which makes me wonder who paid for the assembly of Google's data base?

The article did not examine what constitutes a 1-gram very well. Do all forms of a verb count separately in the study? Because in a dictionary, there would only be one entry. Do comparatives and superlatives count as separate entries - or do all three forms of an adjective count as one? This could easily account for the difference in total number of entries.

Similarly searching for 赵紫阳 (ZhaoZiYang) the disgraced former general secretary of the communist party comes up with a null result, but searching for 紫阳 (ZiYang) shows a sharply peaked curve, peaking during the disturbances that took place in the large square infront of the Great Hall of the People.
There are no such problems searching for 毛泽东(MaoZedong), 邓小平 (DengXiaoping),or 胡锦涛 (HuJintao).
Is it possible that certain names have been airbrushed out of history? If this is really going to be used as a tool for socialogical research, I hope that it hasn't been tinkered with to give biased results.

Indeed it is worrisome what the searches yield on the 5 Chinese names. Indeed one wonders who pays for the assembly of Google's data base? I had thought Google was simply going to digitalize the entire Libray of Congress. Can we say Dr. Michel's culturomics is no better in representing cultural reality than economics is in representation economic reality? As science goes, what does it purport to predict when it matures?

OK - here is an interesting result.
Click onto simplified Chinese and search for 温家宝 (WenJiabao) you'll get 0 results from 1800 to 2008. Then do another search for 家宝 (Jiabao)and you'll see a nice curve following the popularity of the current vice premier of PRC. What could explain this null result? Surely Google hasn't been self censoring its results?

"Reagan" is mentioned quite a bit during his reign but nearly twice as much after 2000. This after a sharp decline in the 1990s. Anything to this?

bit.ly/ftyTLj / bit.ly/g4N8B1

Its also worth pointing out that this is not in fact the first project of its kind or an example of "science invading history" Mark Davies at Brigham Young University created The Corpus of American English which offers a similar, though more refined, database.

@david Wineberg
An 1-gram is a group of text between two spaces. An n-gram is a combination of n 1-grams that are found next to each other, e.g. "the economist" is a 2-gram. The article explains the connection between n-grams and words. It explains that the group found that out of 500+ billion n-grams, about 1 million were unique words (every 500,000 n-grams represents one actual word). They calculated this proportion from a smaller samples of the n-grams, and extrapolated the rest (a generally safe statistical procedure). This would mean that plurals, different forms of verbs, etc were not considered, because they are not unique words.

Cool! I guess that growth in the number of words could be called Linguistic Inflation, for the past amount of words were not enough to represent reality as it became. And that happends because reallity expands and gets more complex.

and as you can see the long tail rule is not just meant for web searches and advertising, it's a cultural pattern! hehe
Nice!